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Ring Floodlight Cam Review

Ring's range of video doorbells is ideal not only for knowing who's coming to your front door but also interacting with them, which is handy if you've got a delivery and you're not in. But they cover only your front door, potentially leaving blind spots such as on your drive.

The Floodlight Cam is a new product from the company that integrates with the doorbell and can be controlled via the same mobile app. It can light up your premises when motion is detected, day or night, record anything that's happening and send an alert direct to your mobile phone.

Should there be anything untoward occurring, you can remotely activate a 110dB siren, utilise two-way audio to warn off the unwanted visitor, and download the video footage as evidence.

RING FLOODLIGHT CAM PRICE & AVAILABILITY

Though it has an RRP of £249.99 the Ring Floodlight Cam can be found online much cheaper, with the cheapest deal we found at the time of writing £189.99 from Amazon UK. Over in the US you'll pay $249 from Amazon.

The Floodlight Cam is available in black or white, so you can buy whichever best suits your property, whether that means blending it in or making it stand out to deter opportunists.

The camera itself is weather-resistant and has a one-year parts warranty, but comes with lifetime purchase protection. This means if someone steals the Floodlight Cam Ring will replace it free of charge. However, for this purchase protection to apply the Floodlight Cam must be purchased from Ring itself.

There is a free 30-day trial for the cloud recording component, and you can still use the Live View mode within the app after this time without subscribing. To access recordings, however, you'll want to subscribe.

A subscription for one device costs £2.50 per month or £24.99 per year, or £8 per month or £80 per year for unlimited devices. It's not at all obvious from within the app, but you can also add another camera to the single plan without subscribing to the unlimited plan.

RING FLOODLIGHT CAM SETUP

If you have an existing security light set up to cover the area as we did, it takes a maximum of 15 minutes to set up the Ring Floodlight Cam. Though the marketing suggests it requires a professional installation, it's quite easy to do yourself if you know what you're doing and take the necessary precautions.

The only things you really need to consider are distance from your wireless router and the availability of mains power. The Floodlight Cam must be hardwired, unlike the video doorbells that can run off battery power, and it must connect to a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi network, with a bare minimum 1Mbps upload speed (2Mbps is recommended).

Like most lights there are just two wires, plus an earth, and you connect it as you would any other light fitting.

If you don't already have the Ring app you can download it free from Google Play or the App Store, and follow the prompts to set up an account.

It's worth pointing out you can also view the feed from a Windows 10 PC or Mac by logging in via the Ring website.

Turn on the camera by pressing the button on top of the Floodlight Cam, then let the software guide you through the configuration process, which includes asking you to connect it to your Wi-Fi network, name the camera, and confirm its location.

The camera will then update its firmware, which can take a few minutes, but is then ready to go.

Using the mobile app you can independently set up motion zones for the lights and the camera, which can run at all times or just certain times such as overnight.

You can also schedule the lights to automatically turn on between certain times, or not to turn on at all during the day, and if you will be going in and out you can snooze motion detection for a predetermined amount of time.

The 110dB siren gives a warning like a car alarm, and must be manually activated from within the app.

Setting the motion zones for the lights works exactly the same as for the video doorbells, allowing you to adjust sensitivity on a sliding scale. But for the cameras you can draw onscreen exactly where you want it to pick up motion, which makes it possible to prevent you getting a notification every time someone passes by or a neighbour pulls on to their drive.

RING FLOODLIGHT CAM IN USE

In our testing with the Ring Floodlight Cam it worked flawlessly, picking up any motion on our driveway and instantly notifying us via our mobile phone. We didn't find many rogue motion alerts, but if you do it's easy to tone down the sensitivity.

The floodlights are incredibly bright, with twin 3000° Kelvin lights, and the audio siren is super-loud at 110dB. Perhaps more importantly, when the Floodlight Cam does pick up motion its recording of the event is crystal clear with a 1080p video feed. If anyone is caught getting up to no good then you'll get a good look at their face, even at night.

The two-way audio works well, given a strong internet connection. Over a mobile network you might find a small amount of lag, but it's workable.

You can angle the camera to get the best picture. It has a 270-degree field of view, but the mount is also adjustable with a 140-degree field of view. If necessary you can pinch to zoom in, either within Live View mode or the recorded video itself.

Recorded videos can be downloaded to your device or shared via Facebook, or in an email or text message. You can also directly upload them to Nextdoor.co.uk if you have an account - this is a private social network for your local neighbourhood. If none of these options suit you can also get a link to the video on Ring's servers that you share via other means.

One potential drawback of these recordings is they are not constant, as they are with other home-security systems. That makes it simpler to find, download and share just the portion of the stream you need, but if action is happening just outside the motion zone it may not pick up all the incriminating footage you'd like.

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